Posted
by
CowboyNeal
on Thursday March 03, 2005 @06:04PM
from the fox-eating-lizards dept.

pigmelon writes "According to BetaNews, 'America Online's Netscape team has opened its doors to the public, releasing the first beta of the revived Netscape Web browser. (screenshot) Based upon Firefox, Netscape version 8 focuses on security and user privacy, and supports rendering with both Mozilla's Gecko and Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser engines.' Before downloading the beta, remember that it uses Firefox 1.0, which contains some vulnerabilities."

Jesus, that screenshot [betanews.com] is like the browser version of my grandfather's "retirement shirts". Except, only if he lived inside Spencer's Gifts, and was a science fiction drama from 1963, and had ADD. And rabies.

"this Firefox UI is great and easy to use, so let's add a bunch crazy buttons and just generally shit all over it! Oh and throw in a theme that makes our customers want to claw out their eyes. And for extra confusion, make sure some of the pages load with IE so people are never sure what behaviour they're going to get!"

(Not.)
The worst of all worlds.
(Now that was serious.)
I've been hoping someone would do this.
(Unserious, more like fearing someone would do this.)
I guess I'll switch.
(Nearly coughing after fit of maniac laughter.)
No, not really. Sticking with Firefox. It seems to be what Netscape could have been had Netscape not believed its own hype and what IE should have been if only MS could see past proprietarily customizing everything that doesn't move fast enough.
(Looks like that IE-based browser that came with Flyswatter prominently packaged, but forget the name of it off hand...)

I don't know much about the Mozilla license, but could AOL (AOL did buy Netscape right?) (a) stop the development of Mozilla (change the license to closed source/proprietary) or (b) sell Netscape (Gecko engine of coruse)?

Sure, my ATI card can rotate the screen, and I can put my trinitron on its side, which is flat along one edge and would probably tilt my screen at just the right angle given the position it would hold on my desk. However, I haven't yet found a good use for a 1200x1600 display...

the problem is a bug in firefox. it not caused by slashdots fucked up html code. you can get the same display bug on a fully valid html document. they have examples in the bugzilla. and it's already fixed in cvs.

What, now we have to go to CVS [cvs.com] to purchase a fix for Firefox? I knew that the open source developers would, oh, wait a sec, you're talking about Concurrent Versions System, not CVS pharmacy, nevermind.;)